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Toshiba Begins Selling MacBook Air SSD
Lucas123 writes "Toshiba has made the solid state drive used in the new MacBook Air generally available for use by equipment manufacturers. At just 2.2mm thick, the company said the drive represents a new form factor that is about one-third the thickness of a thin hard disk drive and that is 42% smaller than even a mini-SATA SSD module. The new Blade X-gale SSD series has a maximum throughput of 220MB/sec. and can store up to 256GB of data."
They will get cheaper. I picked up a 60G SSD from Newegg for under $100 after rebate. In a few months I expect that to be the normal price.
Is it worth it? Hell, yes. For systems where you need a lot of space or battery life isn't an issue, then they're probably not ideal. However, in a netbook they are amazing. I have a Samsung N120 with a 1.6GhZ Atom. With a standard HD, it was boggy. Resuming from suspend would take a minute. Launching apps would take 15 to 30 seconds. After installing the SSD it's like a new machine. Resume takes a few seconds. App launch times is a second or three. Browsing the web is snappier. I.e., anything that does multiple reads from the drive is much faster. If you replaced your standard laptop drive you may not notice it, but replacing a relatively slow HD in a netbook makes a huge difference. On top of it, my battery times climbed to at least 4 hours of constant use.
BTW, the SSDs run great with bcache/Linux. I'm putting together some benchmarks, but even before I run the numbers I can tell you that CentOS and Ubuntu on an Atom-based machine (a mini-pc form factor) runs incredibly.